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Scripture: Isaiah 35.5-7 (NLT)
5 And when he comes, he will open the eyes of the blind and unplug the ears of the deaf.
6 The lame will leap like a deer,
and those who cannot speak will sing for joy!
Springs will gush forth in the wilderness,
and streams will water the wasteland.
7 The parched ground will become a pool,
and springs of water will satisfy the thirsty land.
Marsh grass and reeds and rushes will flourish
where desert jackals once lived.
Comments
A challenge of Advent is to see scriptures addressing both Christ's first coming and Christ's final coming in God-Time, Eternal Time, or what the New Testament calls Kairos. This, indeed, is the only way to interpret many Old Testament texts as applying to the Christian faith. Likewise, such texts are symbolic. They speak on multiple levels of meaning (i.e., they are multivalent). Yet, this does not so spiritualize them that they do not address real or potential historical reversals. To reduce passages addressing reversals in political fortune, for example, to apply only psychologically to persons is a misreading of the passages.
We are not to take these passages literally, but we are to take them seriously. Many biblical literalists cannot take much of the messianic scriptures seriously enough, for in projecting them into the future, they remove their immediate and continuing fulfillments in the Present: thus, reducing Kairos to kronos, or Eternal-Time to linear-time.
These passages are inspired by the Holy Spirit, not in a mechanical fashion and to single persons apart from community. Rather, divine inspiration entails a process of the Mind of God operating within the faith community: this, again, is a point Christian literalists--in their usual focus on individualism and abdication of the essential communal operations of the faith experience--totally miss.
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Our scripture today speaks in symbolism of a marked reversal of fortunes: blind see, deaf hear, lame leap, dumb sing--and these personal reversals or matched by reversals in nature. The inspired principles apply to the faith community and the person-in-community. The underlying, prophetic dynamic is the process of envisioning.
Advent is a time in which our lectionary scriptures call us to a fresh envisioning. Vision is the inner thought, or inward picture, which we see through the innate soul capacity of imagination, before it materializes. But, how does the vision materialize?
Ironically, we often must be shaped to the divinely inspired vision. Our waiting, a key theme in Advent, is so we might be formed to receive the vision. Often, we long to receive what we can inwardly anticipate, but we are not prepared, and sometimes not ready, to receive its materialization: indeed, often we block the materialization, knowing innately that we are not shaped to receive the vision.
"God gives us a vision," as noted by Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost for His Highest, but, then, "takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of that vision." As he notes, often we proceed quickly to fulfill a vision, immediately after receiving it, but it is not yet real within us. See, the vision is not something separate from us, as though we can enjoy it without being conformed to it. Rather, enjoying it is an intimate experience of being one with the vision. The vision must be real in us, or we cannot receive it outside us.
I tend to think our church processes are sometimes rather oddly funny. We get in a hurry, God is beyond hurry. Churches can become a people of religious busy-bodies, God is beyond busy. We can seek to manage church renewal with methodical processes, quite impressive on paper. Such will not work, not ultimately. We cannot manage Spirit, rather, the best management we can do is to manage to get out of the way.
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